Let me make two things clear up front:
- I'd personally rather the government and other busybodies stay as much as possible out of ALL personal decisions, from health to education to the way we raise our children to the food we eat. (Inform and educate, yes; regulate, no.)
- Representative Akin's remarks about "legitimate rape" and pregnancy showed appalling ignorance, there's no doubt about that.
BUT it seems to me that we're always missing the main issue: Rape doesn't change what abortion IS. (Or is not.) Either abortion following rape compounds one assault with another, so that there are two innocent victims of the crime instead of one, or it does not. If it does not, then it makes not the slightest bit of difference whether the abortion is done on woman who has been raped or on a woman who simply does not want to be pregnant. On the other hand, if abortion does double the number of victims, then even in the case of rape it is rightly an agonizing decision, and we need to help the woman through it, not somehow think to reassure her by insisting that because she was the victim of violence, the obvious right course of action is to inflict violence on another.
I wrote this in response to a discussion on Facebook, and can never resist getting double mileage out of something that takes time and thought to write:
Ay, there's the rub. There is no shortage of answers. Will we ever come to know an answer that is correct and not just "in my opinion"?
What's certain is that we can't possibly know as long as we dance around and pretend that the problem lies anywhere else. We can't even begin to understand other people's actions if we don't face that.
It's not about rape. It's not about the desperately hard cases. It's not about who's compassionate and who's not. It's not about freedom. It's not even about the political and commercial interests that profit from abortion and/or its controversy, though they abound.
It's about this:
Is abortion the destruction of a human being? There are situations in which killing a person is not considered murder, but civilization itself requires us to recognize it as a desperate matter and to hedge it around with severe constraints and strict controls.
Is abortion the moral equivalent of eating a fertilized chicken egg for breakfast? To impose unity in such situations is tyranny.
In many ways it's like the climate change controversy: either we are plunging headlong into ecological disaster that we can avert with radical changes and thus can justify significant collateral damage, or we are not (either not at all, or not at such a critical rate), in which case even healthy changes to our industry and economy must take into consideration the impact on people's lives and livelihoods.
What complicates the situation(s) is that it matters so much whose ox is being gored. It is hard even to look for truth, much less see it, when we know in advance what we want it to look like.
But at the very least we can, should, must:
* Acknowledge what the real issue is,
* Not demonize those who disagree with us, but recognize that they are human beings like us ("Ain't I a woman?"), and, like us, are speaking and acting from reason, compassion, and concern for what's right,
* Make a serious attempt to look at the situation from other perspectives, and
* Admit that, however unlikely the possibility, we might actually be wrong.
Without this we will get nowhere—certainly nowhere good.
